Is n8n free? What the community edition includes and when self-hosting costs more

What the free community edition includes

• Unlimited workflows and executions on your own infrastructure
• All 400+ integrations, the HTTP Request node and the Code node (JavaScript and Python)
• AI nodes: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Ollama, vector stores and the AI Agent node
• Credentials encryption, webhooks, cron scheduling, error workflows and retries
• Queue mode with Redis for horizontal scaling
• Import and export of workflows as JSON, the public REST API and the CLI

For most small and mid-size businesses this is the whole product. The workflows we build for lead follow-up, quoting, invoicing, reporting and support triage run entirely on the community edition.

What the free edition leaves out

• Hosting, backups, updates and monitoring, which you run yourself
• SSO/SAML, LDAP, log streaming and granular permissions, which are Enterprise features
• Environments (dev/staging/production) and Git-based version control, also Enterprise features
• Support with a response time, since the community forum is the only support channel
• Some AI credits bundled with Cloud plans

A single team with one or two admins rarely misses these. A company that needs audit logs, SSO or several environments should look at n8n Cloud Business or Enterprise, or budget the engineering time to build equivalents around the community edition.

n8n Cloud pricing in 2026

• Starter: from about €20 per month, roughly 2,500 executions and 5 active workflows, for one person or a small proof of concept
• Pro: from about €50 per month, roughly 10,000 executions and 15 active workflows, the plan most small teams end up on
• Business: from about €667 per month, 40,000 executions, environments, SSO and more collaboration features
• Enterprise: custom pricing for compliance, scale and support agreements

n8n counts an execution as one full workflow run, however many steps it has. A 15-step workflow that runs 1,000 times costs 1,000 executions. Zapier would count 15,000 tasks for the same work. So at the same volume, n8n Cloud often costs less than Zapier or Make, even before you consider self-hosting.

Running costs of a free self-hosted instance

A VPS that runs n8n comfortably costs €5 to €20 per month. The real cost is time. n8n ships a new version almost every week, so someone has to read release notes and update. You must back up the PostgreSQL database and the encryption key, because without the key your stored credentials are unreadable. TLS certificates, disk space, memory and the reverse proxy need monitoring. When a workflow stops silently at 3 a.m., someone has to notice.

In our experience a stable instance takes about two hours of maintenance a month, and an unstable one takes far more. If that time is worth more than €50 to your business, n8n Cloud Pro is the cheaper option, even though the software itself is free.

When self-hosting is the right choice

• Tens of thousands of runs a month, where Cloud tiers become expensive
• Customer data that must stay in your region or on your own servers
• Long-running or heavy executions and custom community nodes
• You already run Docker, backups and monitoring for other services, so n8n is one more container
• You want to use the free edition to learn before paying for anything

When n8n Cloud is the cheaper option

• Fewer than about 10,000 executions a month
• Nobody in-house wants to own updates, backups and incidents
• You need version rollback, environments or SSO without building them
• A small team for which €20-50 per month is not worth discussing

A minimal self-hosted setup

If you decide to self-host, use Docker Compose with n8n, PostgreSQL and a reverse proxy such as Caddy or Traefik on a €10 VPS. Store the encryption key in a password manager and dump the database nightly to object storage. Add an uptime check on the health endpoint and an error workflow that posts failures to Slack or email. Update on a fixed day each month, after a backup. We publish the exact setup in our guide to self-hosting n8n on a small VPS.

Wasevo runs this stack for clients and for its own automations, and can set it up for a fixed price or keep it running on a monthly plan.